stuck Archives - Annie Bellet

Posts Tagged ‘stuck’

But I Get Up Again

I never realized how stuck I’d gotten after writing that story that just failed. I’ve started and not finished three stories in the last week. Not finished. I usually finish shorts in one sitting. It’s the novels I poke at (and I’m poking, I’m poking. Gotta get the MG one done soon, seriously). I got stuck because I’m afraid that every word is more fail.

Fuck it. Seriously. So I failed. That story really doesn’t work at all and nothing will save it (maybe the setting, the setting might, the setting is good.) I have to get over that. Move past it. It’s so easy to dwell on what doesn’t work, what feels or reads wrong. I think my academic side lets me down here, because I’ve been trained to pick things apart. It’s time to get back up. The mini self-inflicted rollercoaster of “I suck!” and “I might not suck!” annoys me. It’s stupid and it is stopping my writing.

In 11 minutes I turn 29. I hope that someday I’ll look back at my 20s as the years it really started. Addicts have their sobriety dates, I guess writers have their “got serious” dates. Mine is Feb 4th 2009. I’ve got a year left of my 20s. I want to make it a good one, one where I did everything in my power to reach my goals. For my birthday I wrote myself a check and dated it Feb 4th, 2020. I won’t say the amount, but it is fairly ambitious, at least I hope. As I enter the final year of this decade of life, I want to know that I didn’t let the little things get me down. And that when they did, I got back up.

Now, I should go practice what I preach and finish some damn stories. Because no one is going to buy stuff I haven’t written and submitted.

Stuck Again?

Heh, it would figure that I would post about goals and dreams and then… get stuck. Yeah, it happens. I don’t get idea block, I get too many ideas and they make it hard to focus. That is what usually happens when I’m stuck, anyway.

This time is a combination of too many ideas and just plain old self-pity/loathing. A bunch of rejections came in, every single one of them with the general message “close, but no thanks, please send more”. This is good on one level. I’m close! On the other hand, I’ve been there before. I don’t want to have a story come close, I want the story to sell. Close is just frustrating at this point. The other reason I’m stuck is because I wrote a story that failed. My writing brain was fighting me the whole process and then I made myself finish the story (and send it out, because I knew if I let anyone read it before I did I would never get the courage to mail it).

What did my first reader say? “Awesome setting but I don’t care about the characters or what is happening until page 11.” Ok, I could cut the first ten pages, but wait, it is only a 12 page story. Yeah. Sigh. So what I was trying to do didn’t go well. But hey, setting! Maybe some editor out there will love the feel of the story enough to ignore the rest. Who knows?

But inside I feel a bit down. I wrote a story last week that both my first readers thought was the best thing I’ve done yet. Then this week, I fail. It makes getting back on the horse tough. I’ve made myself start another story and gotten about a thousand words down, but I keep finding reasons to walk away from the keyboard. Like posting here. And doing house chores.

So I failed at the story I was trying to tell. So what? I need to pick myself up. It’s just a story. I still have the idea, I can always write a better version knowing what went wrong with the first one. Meanwhile, I have other projects that have deadlines (at least, the places I want to submit them close very soon, so it is kinda like a deadline). I can do this. Write, finish, mail. Fire and forget.

It’s going to be a scary day when I get up to 80 stories out. If the stars align, I could technically get 80 rejections in one day. Yeah. Scary.

(Flip side is that I could also make 80 sales in one day. I think one is about as likely as the other, so I should stop tilting at windmills and get writing, right?)

Perfectionists Ate My Baby

I’m stuck. Yes, again. I think in some ways the first draft of this novel has broken me. It is such a mess (hence the total rewrite instead of just editing) that I’m terrified to let the second draft be anything less than perfect. So I agonize over every word, every concept, until builds into a huge pile of stagnated nothing.

I think I know where I want to go from here. I think I see how to start doing it. But I can see the little problems that will crop up later, the complications of plot and character that I’m not sure how to write myself free from. I’m suffering from a desire to get it right the first time, amusingly enough because I didn’t get it right the first time. I don’t know if I have another total rewrite in me. I don’t know if I love this story that much. I feel I owe my first novel a better chance at life than just that one messy draft. I’m terrified that it will come out just as ugly and misshapen, another monstrosity to expose on the hillside as I tell myself “oh, there there, you’ll have more children.” What if they are all monsters?

So, I’m stuck. What’s my plan of attack?

To write.

As they say: here goes nothing.